Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at Movie Armaments Group up in Toronto. One of the biggest, if not the biggest, movie guns and gear supply houses in Canada. And their owner, Richard Collins, has a complete Stoner 63A system that he
has offered to let us take a look at today. So what you're seeing here is probably ... almost the most well recognised version of the Stoner, this is the light machine gun pattern.
But the whole purpose of this design was one receiver that could be configured
into six or seven different types of firearm. And we have the parts to show you every single
one of them today, which is going to be really cool. So we'll start with a little bit of basic history
on the gun. This was of course a design conceived by Eugene Stoner after
he had done the AR-15, or M16. He had been working for the Armalite company, part
of Fairchild, and they sold the AR-15 patents to Colt. And so at that point the gun is pretty well
developed, Stoner needs something to do. And he's got the idea for a modular gun,
which is obviously what you see here. He first put this together as
a design he called the M69W, cleverly noting that that designation looks
the same when you flip it upside down. Because the way that his modular gun worked was that
you could take the receiver and if it was right-side up it was in magazine feed configuration
where it would feed from the bottom. If you flip it over you could then build all the parts back on the same
receiver but it could feed from the top from a belt-fed mechanism. And this would allow you to have a gun that
was a carbine, or a rifle, or a survival rifle, and also an automatic rifle, a light machine gun, a
medium machine gun, or a vehicular fixed machine gun. Now the M69W never really
went past the prototype stage, but he used it to enter into negotiations
with the Cadillac Gage Company. They were interested, and in 1961
they signed an agreement with him and basically he went to work for Cadillac Gage
developing this cool modular weapons idea. The first actual version that they put together was
actually the Stoner 62, as you might suppose in 1962. And this was effectively this gun
but in .308, in 7.62 NATO calibre. Which ... in some ways made more sense
from a military perspective than the .223, because as a medium machine gun in 7.62 NATO it could
fill a role that, nyah, you can't quite fill as well with 5.56. Things like a vehicular machine gun, anti-aircraft capability. Those things are a lot harder to do with
5.56, a lot harder to justify than .308. Anyway, people weren't really interested in the .308 though. ... We're starting to be on the cusp of the
small-calibre revolution in military armaments. Of course, the AR-15 has been sold to Colt, and it's
going to become obviously a breakthrough thing. The US military is going to be adopting it. And worldwide what Cadillac Gage found is that people were
far more interested in this gun as a 5.56 than as a 7.62mm. So they went back to the drawing board a bit.
And actually with the help of the same two guys who had helped design the AR-15 from
the AR-10, Bob Fremont and James Sullivan, they scaled this gun down to what we
see today as the Stoner 63 in 5.56 calibre. So before we dive in and take a look at
all the different configurations of this gun, I want to take a minute and discuss what
it's actual history was with the US military. So starting really pretty quickly right off the bat, the
US government, the US military, showed an interest. And DARPA bought like 25 guns in '63 for testing.
So very early in this thing's lifecycle. That testing didn't result in anything specific,
but the gun would go on to be tested by the Army. They did some testing at Aberdeen. The big
test of this was by the US Marine Corps in 1966. And they actually bought several hundred
guns and they issued them out to L Company of the 3rd Marine Battalion, 1st Regiment,
1st Marine Division ... for a field trial in Vietnam. And these guys had the guns for about three months.
They had 27 machine guns, 12 carbines and 135 rifles. And the carbines went to the officers of the unit, while the
machine guns and the rifles were spread between the men. But they had both the belt-fed machine gun version and also
the magazine-fed, what was called the automatic rifle, version. And in very short order the Marines came back
and said, "This automatic rifle version is nonsense, There is no point to it and ... here,
take them back ... get rid of them." And they went on for the remainder
of the test with magazine-fed rifles, traditional pattern rifles, and belt-fed
light machine gun versions. And they were ... weapons that are popular,
but they also have some handicaps. These were relatively finicky guns to keep running. They
had to be well lubricated, they had to ... be kept clean. They are not the bomb-proof guns that are perhaps
more viable for a military force in ongoing active combat. And that's the biggest reason why you would
see this really not adopted by the US military, outside of special small elite
groups like the US Navy SEALs. Because by the way the SEALs ... actually formally
adopted the Stoner as the Mark 23 machine gun. And ... they'd become fairly
notable using these in Vietnam. The SEALs are the one element of the US military
that did formally adopt and use these guns. And in fact, I believe they used them until the early
'80s, when they finally phased them out of service. But the SEALs were guys who are willing
to understand the peculiarities of the gun. They were willing to stay on top of its maintenance
and deal with all of those hassles, ... that overhead, in exchange for the benefits that
the Stoner brought, namely weight. This is a remarkably lightweight gun. In its light
machine gun configuration like this it's 11.7 pounds, and that's like nothing. That's
like 4 pounds less than a 249 SAW. And the SEALs ended up actually often using the
shorter ... barrel, cut about 4.5 inches off the barrel. That version was typically called the Commando
version. That cut something like a pound and a half off. So you're talking about a ... belt-fed 5.56 machine
gun that weighs about the same as an M1 Garand. And that was a very appealing
compromise to make, so. Ultimately the gun would never be accepted
by the US military beyond the SEALs. There was a trial in the early '70s for the SAW program
that would end up adopting the FN Minimi as the M249. On Stoner's recommendation, Cadillac Gage
opted not to try and enter the Stoner 63 into that trial. Stoner saw from the way all of the military procurement
had gone that he didn't think this gun actually had a legitimate chance in that trials. And he was almost certainly
right. And that was pretty much the end of the Stoner program. So we're going to go ahead and take a look
at the details of this, and we'll also get into talking about when this changed
from the 63 to the 63A, because there are substantial differences between the
two, and it's important to distinguish between them. But first, let's look at the modularity. So there is a lot to cover on how
this whole system goes together. So we will start with just the receiver
framework, and that's what we have here. Permanently mounted to it are a couple of components: the gas
port, the ejection port dust cover, and a couple of blocks back here. This block serves as the barrel
latch. So we have a spring in there, and a big round peg that goes through into
the trunnion and locks the barrel in place. We also have this square little lug right
there. That is the front magazine catch. For the magazine fed versions the
Stoner uses its own proprietary magazine, because it is a rock and lock magazine, which
was essential for the modular concept here. You couldn't have a straight push-in magazine because
that requires a long magazine well like the M16. And you can't have that long
magazine well hanging off all the time when you're trying to, say, put sights
there, or put a belt-feed adapter there. So there's a little square hole
in the front of the magazine. That is hooked by this little lug. We have another permanent block
located here a little bit farther back. That includes the ejector, just one ejector
for all different configurations of the gun. And it's also actually got a
little mounting slot right here. That slot fits this little guy,
which is the hold open device. So you don't have to use the magazine
hold open, but if you do want it, it can be installed right there and it will cause the
... bolt to lock open when the magazine is empty. However, this actually interferes with
mounting the belt-feed unit on the gun, so that's why it is fairly easily removable. If you want to change this into a
machine gun, that little guy's got to go. This does, by the way, point out, again, how this is
not intended to be a field changeable sort of system. This is something that the armourer sets
up as whatever pattern of gun you want, and then it runs that way until
it's taken back to the armourer. We have a couple of attachment points here at the back. Those
are to fit whatever sort of buttstock you want to put on the gun. ... We'll go over all the different versions in a minute. We have a lug here which supports the charging handle. We have these three sets of mounting holes at the
top which are there to attach, well, all manner of stuff. Trigger groups if you're in machine gun configuration,
and sights if you're in rifle configuration. And all of the markings are up here on, I guess you'd call
it the top, there isn't really a defined top to the receiver. They are all marked "Stoner 63", including
the 63As, they didn't change the designation. Manufactured by Cadillac Gage in Warren, Michigan. The early ones were actually made in
Costa Mesa. Right about number 230 the whole project was looking like it had
a long and successful future ahead of it. And so Cadillac decided to move the operation from
Costa Mesa where Armalite had been, where Stoner was, out to one of their larger plants in Michigan.
That's when that change took place. In total there would be about 2,400 of these
Stoner 63s, the early ones, manufactured. And then about 850 of the Stoner 63As,
and this specific gun is a 63A. Interestingly, these lugs here, this one and
this one, would remain on ... all of the guns. But the only purpose of this is to act as a mounting point
for the tripod adapter for the medium machine gun version. And that's one of the patterns that was pretty much
dropped right off the bat. Very few tripod adapters were made. We'll take a look at one in a minute, but
it's interesting that those mounting lugs remained on the guns all the way through production. And last but not least, we
have a gas tube here at the front. Obviously all of the different
configurations are gas piston operated. and so they all require use of that guy and
it's permanently mounted to the receiver. Now let's start taking a look at
some of the individual components, and how they differ between
the different patterns of the gun. So what we have here are, of course,
two different fire control groups. But this one is set up for a rifle or carbine, and this
one is set up as a machine gun fire control group. And the major difference here is that in its machine gun
configurations the Stoner 63 series fires from an open bolt. Which is what you would want for a
machine gun. It gives better cooling, and it prevents the possibility of cookoff by
never having a cartridge sitting in the chamber heating up, waiting to get so hot that it fires. In the rifle configurations
you want exactly the opposite, because you don't want to have the bolt slamming
forward when you're trying to make a nice precise shot. So in the rifle and carbine configurations,
the gun needs to fire from a closed bolt. And in order to do that Stoner set up two different
sets of parts, both in the same trigger housing. There's really a lot of engineering ingenuity that went
into this gun. So this one is our machine gun group, and you can see it just has one sear in the back.
And when you pull the trigger the sear goes down, that allows the gun to fire. When you release the trigger the
sear comes up, catches the bolt, and it stops firing. Very simple. In the rifle or carbine version here, we have some extra
bits at the front in the form of a hammer fired system. So there's a hammer and there is an auto sear here, so before it will fire in full-auto
you have to trip the auto sear. Then when you're holding the trigger,
the hammer will go forward. When the bolt cycles back it's going to re-cock
the hammer. Then when the bolt goes forward, it trips the auto sear, drops the
hammer, and continues to fire. Now the selector switch here is full-auto and semi-auto.
And that's one of the differences with the 63A and the 63, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.
But one other thing to note here, the mounting pin for the rifle, or in this
case specifically the carbine, system has this long protrusion on the left side.
That is actually the ... locking point for the stock. Stoner made both fixed stocks and side
folding stocks. And the side folding stock has this hole in it with a little wire spring, so that when
you fold the stock open it will actually ... lock onto this peg coming out the side of, well, kind of the
middle of the receiver once this is mounted in the gun, and that's what actually locks
the stock in the folded position. So in order to actually fold this you grab
these two pegs, squeeze them together, and then the stock folds like so. And it
just snaps back into the extended position. So you've got your spring
detent there to hold it folded, and these two latches to hold
it in the extended position. Both types of stock have a lug here
that loops up underneath that crossbar and a locking pin on the bottom.
So you just hook that in there, push the stock through, and then pin it in place. So you can shoot these basically in any of the
configurations with a fixed or a folding stock. Or if you want the ... mounted machine gun, the
vehicular or aircraft mounted machine gun version, well, of course, you don't want a buttstock. Instead for a set up like that you
need the gun to be solenoid fired, so the way this is designed is that
when this solenoid fires, it pulls this in, which pulls ... this trigger bar backwards, like so. And that is why there is a hole cast
into every single Stoner 63 trigger. This bar drops into the hole right there,
and that's how it pulls the trigger back. Now in order to make this work
you actually remove the pistol grip, because this doesn't quite fit in
place with the pistol grip in there. But ... if you have a vehicular mounted solenoid-fired
gun it doesn't need a pistol grip on it anyway. So, that is the setup for the mounted gun. I should also point out that the selector
here works great in the hammer-fired mode, but for the machine guns there is no semi-auto.
So if you don't have the hammer installed, semi-auto or full-auto this works exactly
the same way. It's always in full-auto. Alright, now let's take a look at the actual
operating bits, the bolt carrier and gas piston. We have two of them here because there is yet more
cleverness in this system that needs to be shown. Now first off, there's actually a series of tungsten
weights that are somewhat free-floating in the gas piston and those act as an anti-bounce
device, which is in its own right rather clever. But when it comes to the modular aspects of the gun,
what we really want to look at is up close in here. So notice that these two are oriented the same way,
except that these parts are 180 degrees different. And that is very deliberate. So this is set up as a rifle,
and this is set up as a machine gun right now. And ... so a couple things to look at. First off this geometric feature right here, this shark-fin looking
piece, is the element that actually trips the auto sear. So if you're firing full-auto with a rifle, you need
something that is going to trip this little guy, right there, which is what allows the ... hammer
to fall in full-auto for each subsequent shot. So when you've got ... the bolt
carrier configured in this way, as this goes forward it's going to
hit that lever right there and trip it. Now when you've got this reversed for the machine gun
configuration, that fin is up here and it does nothing. Which is fine because, well, there's no
... auto-disconnector in the full-auto trigger group. But there's one more aspect to this
that's clever that we need to consider. When you've got this all the way locked
in battery in the rifle configuration, the firing pin is flush with the bolt face and nothing
happens until you actually push on the firing pin. And then it comes through the bolt face and
fires. That's what the hammer is there to do. On the machine gun version however,
when you rotate this piece 180 degrees it actually cams the firing pin
farther in and locks it in place. Because in the machine gun mode this has
a fixed firing pin that's always protruding. So it's going to pick up a cartridge in this configuration. It's
going to push it into the chamber, it's going to rotate and lock. And the moment that it's fully locked, the firing pin
automatically protrudes without being hit by any hammer (which is good because in the machine
gun fire control group there is no hammer). And it's going to fire and
then start the cycle over again. And the sear engagement surface as a
machine gun is here on the opposite side. So that is how this thing is set up to fire as
a closed bolt, hammer fired gun as a rifle, and as an open bolt, full-auto weapon
... in the machine gun configuration. Now when it comes to charging handles, there are
three different versions that we have to talk about. And this is one of the many areas where the Stoner
design and history get kind of complex and messy. So basically what we have here
is the original 63 charging handle, we have a 63A rifle charging handle, and then we have the SEAL
Mark 23 machine gun charging handle. So all of these are actually
mechanically working the same way. There's a little lug here on the top of the operating rod, the charging handle dovetails, basically,
into that. These are all non-reciprocating, so they allow you to pull ... the bolt
back and then the handle goes forward. These all have a little spring-steel clip here at the
front that hooks into this bracket on the receiver, which locks the charging handle in the
forward position when you're shooting. But originally on the Model 63 this was the charging handle
for all models, and it was a side mounted charging handle. So it's got a little round cutout here that
hooks over this lug on the side of the receiver, and it's going to snap in there,
and it operates like so. So it'll snap into place in the front, non-reciprocating,
and then you can use it to charge the rifle. And in machine gun mode it
was on the right side like this. and on rifle mode it was on left side to
be charged like this. And it was all good. However, they decided ... that this was less desirable. So one of the changes of the Model 63A was to set this aside for only machine gun use. And in rifle use they would instead have a
top-mounted charging handle that would sit up here. If we put on the rifle handguard, you can
see that this sits nice and high up on top. It's got a little cutout in it so it doesn't
interfere with your sight picture, and that was the 63A method of
charging the rifle and the carbine. The machine guns, like I said,
maintained the side charging handle. Now a problem with this charging handle
showed up when the SEALs adopted the Mark 23, which had a right hand feed system
(which I'm just loosely holding in place here). But you can see how having a belt hanging out of
this feeding gets in the way of that charging handle. So what they did at that point was to take that existing rifle charging handle, extend it so it was a little bit
longer, mount it in the same place right there. And then cut a big slot in the bottom of the
handguard so that this guy could now fit right through. (Again, we'll just hold this in place.) This
would now extend below the handguard on the machine gun version and not
interfere with the belt feed system. So that's the third variety which is specifically for the
right-hand feed machine guns as adopted by the SEALs. Now, let's look at sights. There are three different
versions of sights that were set up on the guns. So of course the belt feed models have the
sights mounted to the belt feed unit itself, which is then pinned onto the receiver.
And all of these by the way are aperture sights. So we've got a left-hand belt
feed and a right-hand belt feed (we'll go into a little more detail about why they
made the change from one to the other here). We then have the standard sights for the rifle version,
which is just a ... two position flip rear aperture sight, with this lightweight system of wings to protect it. The reason that this sight has to be so long
is because it needs to use the standard spaced push pins to mount to the top of the receiver. And then of course, we also have the automatic rifle version
which is magazine-fed, but with a box magazine from the top. Now the reason to do that is because the
automatic rifle presumably is going to be fired primarily prone from the bipod, and it's a lot easier
to change magazines on a configuration like that. When you're shooting that way, it's a lot easier
to change mags on the top than on the bottom. Especially if you have a two-man team with your
gunner firing and your assistant gunner for reloading. ... There is good reason why there were so many top-fed
light machine guns during like the World War Two era, and the 1930s, the Bren, the Nambus. These are guns that really took advantage of
the speed of a two-man team reloading this way. However, of course, that means your magazine's in the
middle, which means your sights have to be offset to the side. So the rear sight's offset to the left, and the
front sight is similarly also offset to the left. These are all windage and elevation
adjustable, and they're really good sights. Alrighty, for barrels, there are five versions. We've got four
of them here to show you, but you can see all of the elements. At the very top we have the carbine barrel.
This is 15.7 inches with a bayonet lug. And then of course it's got its adjustable front
sight, flash hider, everything you would expect. Note that we have this hole here at the bottom,
this is where the barrel catch holds onto the barrel. Right below it we have the rifle barrel, which
is basically the same thing but 20 inches long, again with the locking hole in the bottom. When we get to the bottom two, now ... we've
flipped the gun over into machine gun form, and so now the locking
hole is going to be on the top. Because ... there's only one
locking catch on the receiver, and it's going to catch the bottom of a rifle
barrel or the top of a machine gun barrel. So both of these machine gun
barrels are also 20 inches long. They have carry handles on them, which ... can be set up
either with the handle up on top or folded over to either side. This is the Bren gun barrel, so
its front sight is offset to the left. You'll notice it has the same flash hider, but it's a substantially
heavier profile barrel because it's intended for continuous fire. Then lastly at the bottom we have
the actual machine gun barrel. Now the one that we're missing here is what was
called a Commando barrel, which is 15.7 inches, but the heavy weight, the heavy
profile, of the machine gun barrel. And the one extra thing that we see here that we don't see on any of the others is this guy, which is a gas regulator. So this is very similar to the gas regulator
on the late pattern Portuguese AR-10s. You use a bullet tip to rotate it, you have three different
positions. And this is important and necessary to the gun because in this, the belt-fed machine
gun version, you've got a lot of extra drag on the action because
you're pulling a belt over. Where all of these other types are using a magazine that has
its own spring and and pushes rounds out on its own power. With the belt feed you're pulling a lot more
energy out of this gas system to operate the gun. So it's important to be able to adjust the gas
pressure if your belt is dirty or the gun gets dirty, something that's not as relevant
to the other configurations. So you saw that every ... pattern
of the barrel has a bayonet lug. These are designed to take a standard M16 pattern
bayonet, which of course makes sense in context. However, one of the ... last iterations of the
Stoner was developed by NWM in the Netherlands, and they actually produced their ... own pattern
of bayonet that would also fit all of the Stoners. And this is basically a copy of the AKM
bayonet with the wire cutting setup, the two clips. So, it's pretty cool to be able to have one of these that
we can show you, because those are pretty rare bayonets. Now these bayonets were actually subcontracted out to a company
called Solingen which made bayonets for a whole bunch of rifles. And the way you can identify a specifically
Stoner pattern is that little squirrel logo above the letters "NWM" in a Mauser-like banner, so. So when the Stoner 63 was first introduced
... the belt-fed version fed from the left side. This was traditional, typical, it's what you would expect.
However, there was a little bit of a wrinkle in this, because the receiver had to be modular
and interchangeable with the rifle version. And in its rifle configuration the gun needs to eject out the
right side of the gun to accommodate right-handed shooters, which meant when you flip it over, now in the machine
gun configuration it's going to eject out the left. But it's also feeding [on] the left,
and what this meant was ... you've got a belt coming in here and you don't want
the empty cases to interfere with the belt coming in. So there's this deflector plate here, cases will come
out this side, bounce off that plate and go down. Well, the one hiccup was occasionally
a case would come out, hit this, and actually bounce back into the
ejection port and cause a malfunction. And at the time they were calling these
spin-back malfunctions, as in the case hit that plate and spun back into
the receiver. And this is a problem they would ultimately ... not
really solve until the Mark 23, the very last military iteration of the Stoner. And what they did on
the Mark 23 was they reversed the whole thing so it now fed from the right and ejected from the left. So let's touch on this in just a moment, but first when we look at the left hand feed system,
we have a feed tray here that has this little notch in it. Ammunition was supplied in these
plastic boxes. This is a 100 round box. They're fairly fragile, let's see, yeah, this
one's got a big ol' crack in it down there. And the way this worked is you had the lid
that could come off. And when the ammunition was being issued or carried or stored, you held
the lid on like this and it sealed it up very nicely. When you went to actually
shoot it, you would pull the lid off, and then flip it around, put it back in on this side. And then that covered the top of
the box and kept dirt and junk out, but it left you this nice little opening
where the belt could feed up and out, and you've got this bracket on the side
there, and that hooks into your feed tray. And then as long as the feed cover is closed this box can't
come out or fall off, and all of the ammunition is nicely protected. This is a good system. Again except for one
potential issue, which is that all the weight is hanging off the left side of the gun. This was exacerbated with the larger
150 round box ammunition carrier, which really put a lot of awkward
moment on the left side of the gun. And that was ... the downside to this system.
Now there was a solution that was put forth, which was a separate bracket that held
a ...150 round, circular, drum carrier. And that positioned that drum
centre line below the gun. However, it wasn't quickly detachable like these plastic
boxes were. So the trade-off was you could have the gun awkwardly off balance with 150
rounds on the side, but easily reloadable. Or you could have the gun better balanced
with all of the ammunition centred in the gun, but when you needed to reload it you pretty
much couldn't take that drum bracket off. And if you need to reload, you'd have to have a spare belt
like wrapped around your shoulders or something like that. Now the Mark 23 solved this issue by
switching from left-hand to right-hand feed. This may be non-traditional for Western or American
machine guns, but it certainly worked better in this case. And then you'll notice that ... it doesn't
have that mounting bracket hanging off of it. Instead the bracket was a separate piece, right here, which
actually attached to two of the bottom pins on the receiver. Sorry, it should be this direction. It has a protected feedway going
up the side, which we can pop open, and then you ... can now take these 100 round boxes
and slide them into this mounting piece, right there. And when you mounted this on the gun
now all the weight was once again centred. So now with this arrangement you have all
the weight centred, you have a right hand feed, so you have no risk of ejected cases bouncing back
into the gun. And this pretty much solved all the problems. This was also relatively quick and easy to reload,
you just open that, pull out the empty box, and reload it with a new full box. Now for the medium machine gun configuration
where you've got the Stoner set on a tripod, you of course need a tripod. Well, the US military had lots of Browning pattern
tripods, so Cadillac Gage made up a tripod adapter, which is this. They only made something like 20
of these originally, and very few of them exist today. If you see one of these around it's probably a
reproduction, because there was a batch of repros made by one of the big active Stoner guys. So what this does is make use of these
two side trunnions on the gun, as well as that little hole on the bracket on the gas tube. So that hole fits on this peg,
right there. And then these guys drop into locking brackets right there. We have a spring detent right there. Those drop into their little receptacles. The front
end of the gun is locked in place right there. And presto, your Stoner is solidly locked
onto a tripod for precise long-range fire. So a couple other elements to show you now
that we've got the gun together here as a belt-fed. We can lift up the top cover there. And then the way you would actually
feed this is by opening this panel. This is of course the Mark 23, this is the last
version as adopted by the US Navy SEALs. You have your belt box down here, you're going
to open up the lid just like we talked about, you have your belt coming out here,
and then that goes in there. Alright, you then take your ammo out of the
belt box, pull it up, lay the first round across there, top cover goes down. And as long as the bolt's back you're
ready to go, because this is a push through type of belt. So when you pull the trigger
the bolt's going to go forward, it's going to strip this round out of the
link, shove it into the barrel and fire it. I also want to talk briefly about the bipod,
... there's a little more to this bipod than meets the eye. So it clamps onto the gas tube here. But this also has a little
spring-loaded catch, right there. So when you collapse it like this for storage
in a pouch, it locks itself in this position. So it's not going to be trying to spring open like an
HK G3 bipod or one of the clothes pin M16 bipods. Sorry, not an HK bipod, a CETME bipod
or an M16 clothes pin one. To open it up you squeeze it,
push the lever and then it pops open. And it locks in the open position as well, so once you have it clamped around the gas tube,
it stays there until you push the button to remove it. Once it's in place, of course, it will pivot on the gas
tube. And you can also extend and contract the legs. We've got a button right here, push that in, and you can slide the legs out. And they have
adjustable increments of about every inch. Now when you see pictures of these in use
in Vietnam you generally don't see the bipods. In the jungle combat environment in Vietnam
the bipod just wasn't really all that helpful. Guys tended to shoot these either
from the hip or from the shoulder, because they were light enough
that that was very feasible. Or from the belt box in the case of the Mark 23. On these guns because you've got this metal bracket hanging
down below the gun that's actually attached to the gun, you can rest the thing right on that bracket
and it works as a pretty darn good de-facto rest. And ... for the few times that a rest was necessary,
apparently that was really the more common, the better option than carrying
around and using the bipod. In use with this belt box you don't have to take it off,
you just slide the ammo box out, put a new one in. However, if you do want to remove
this bracket, it's pretty easy to do. We have a button here, squeeze that, and then pull it
forward, and that whole assembly just pops right off the gun. It's held in place by these two half circular points which
lock into these two pins on the bottom of the receiver. So the one last thing I do need to talk about
is the difference between the 63 and the 63A. And these changes came about as the result of the
findings from the Marine Corps' three month long company-scale combat trial in Vietnam in '66 or '67. And, let's see, starting from the beginning. They
got rid of the side charging handle on the rifles. They kept it on the machine guns for the time being, but
they replaced the rifles with a top mounted charging handle. ... One of the more substantive changes is what they
made to the rollers on the back of the bolt carrier. On the original 63s there are two rollers back
here, and they are inflexible. So they don't move. As a result in order to close the top
cover you had to have the gun cocked, so that those rollers fit into the
channel here in the feed system. Well on the 63A they dramatically improved this system
by replacing this with a single roller that's spring-loaded so it can push down. So you can now close the
top cover with the bolt either forward or back. If you close it with the bolt forward, it will push down. When you charge the bolt, it'll pop
back up into position in this channel. They addressed some reliability issues by
making a couple of changes to materials. In particular the bolt and the gas tube were
made with a stainless steel on the 63A, which was a change from the original 63. They nitrided the barrels which
extended barrel life quite a bit. They added a gas regulator here on
the machine gun barrels on the 63A. They added a dust cover to the ejection
port up here on the top cover on the belt feed. Perhaps one of the other more really significant
changes they made was to the fire ... control system. So on the 63s you had a three position
selector that was safe, semi, and auto. On the 63As they swapped that around so you have a
two position selector which is just semi-auto and full-auto. And then they moved the safety to be an M14 or
M1 Garand style of safety lever in the trigger guard. So they split this control into two,
this is safe/fire, that's semi and full. Alright. Well I hope you guys have
enjoyed this somewhat exhaustive dive into all of the different components that make
up the Stoner 63, or 63A, platform and system. I'd like to give a big thanks to Movie Armaments Group, and in particular Richard Collins and Charlie Taylor,
who run the place, for giving me access to this. And even more than that, we are actually
going to go out and take this thing to the range, and do some shooting with it in
several of these different configurations. So definitely stick around
tomorrow to see that awesome video. Thanks for watching. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
Nobody describes the RPD as "very interesting" for firing an intermediate cartridge. It's mostly just shat on for not doing enough damage.
If Gun Jesus told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?
Several hundred weapons is a drop in the hat compared to the tens of thousands of M16 rifles alone. The only faction these would belong in is the Navy Seals.
Well he's a bit wrong here.
A single company of marines was decked out with Stoner 63s in various set ups. They kept breaking them. Weren't marine proof. None of them being in the LMG configuration. Rifle, carbine and Auto rifle versions only.
LMG Stoners were used by special forces only. Both army and navy.
Would be cool...with a lot of ifs. If there was a SEAL faction, if there was a mode more fitting to special operations, et cetera.
It would be more practical to include M14E2s/A1s if we stay by the constant of "line" units and historical plausibility.
Read some memoirs from seals in nam and the stoner was a beautiful tool used.
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Go-Times-Decorated-Member/dp/1494507196
Yeah it would be cool to have. I just want more guns in general. There wasn't a firearm in the world that wasn't in Vietnam, do we really have to be limited to the "standard"?
RPD
Here's the shooting video he did as well.
And they added the Stoner to Killing Floor 2 not that long ago so they already have most of the work done to add it to RS2.